First Impressions: The World Ends With You goes worldwide.

What if you suddenly woke up in the middle of Tokyo's Shibuya district with psychic powers? OK, now what if you were told you were engaged in a game that you had to complete in seven days or you were going to die? Well, if you are like us here at Gaming Target, you will be picking up The World Ends With You this April 22nd. But until then, we are just going to have to settle for a first look at this highly anticipated title.

Mixing a hip-hop and techno inspired soundtrack with gothic elements and then taking it a step further with a splash of Japanese culture references, The World Ends With You definitely seems to be targeting the Persona 3 crowd.

Taking place in the Shibuya district of Tokyo, players will be taking on the role of Neku Sakuraba as he tries to complete ?Death's Game? before he is erased from existence. The only way to complete the game is to defeat a legion of evil manifestations called the ?Noise.? Joining him in his effort to eradicate the Noise is Shiki Misaki, a fashionable girl who, like Neku, is forced to compete in the game.

Exploration of the game's world comes in the form of using the stylus to move Neku and solving various puzzles, nothing major; but from what we have seen, the fighting aspects of the game are going to be either incredibly fun or a complete pain.

Fighting is split into both screens with one character fighting on top and the other on the bottom. While one character will only require the stylus to do the job, the top screen character will have a Dance Dance Revolution-like button pressing sequence to follow. Though it seems players can opt to set their partner character to automatically fight on their own to help decrease the difficulty.

If the art style of The World Ends With You looks familiar, perhaps that is because it was done by Kingdom Hearts and Final Fantasy character designer Tetsuya Nomura. Using wild designs, Tetsuya Nomura really seemed to accomplish the goal of creating the funky, out this world atmosphere that a game like The World Ends With You demands.

Final Thoughts

What is perhaps more important than anything else dealing with The World Ends With You is the fact that it needs to do well here in the U.S. for Square Enix to decide to take a chance on us again with a new IP. It took them a long time to break out of bounds of their guaranteed money making properties, hopefully we can convince them to do it more often. If the Famitsu scores of 10/8/9/8 are of any indication, we will be fine.